The Kitschies, sponsored by Blackwell’s, literature’s most tentacular prize, are pleased to announce the 2018 judging panel and the opening of submissions for books published in the UK in 2018.

These five individuals will be tasked with finding the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining books that contain elements of the speculative and fantastic. Winners receive a total of £2,500 in prize money, as well as one of the prize’s iconic hand-crafted Tentacle trophies.

Last year’s winners were Nina Allan’s The Rift (Red Tentacle) and Alex Wells’ Hunger Makes The Wolf (Golden Tentacle), selected from a shortlist that included works by Jess Richards, RJ Barker, JY Yang, and Michelle Tea..

The judges for the Red and Golden Tentacles, for novels and debut novels, are Lucy Smee, Matt Webb, Sharan Dhaliwal, Daniel Carpenter, and Adam Roberts.

Adam Roberts said:

“This is my second stint as a Kitschies Judge and I can only hope that this round is as stimulating and edifying as it was the first time. It’s a real privilege to be able to read so widely in contemporary SF, and hopefully we judges can do our bit to bring the most exciting and progressive SF and Fantasy to a wider audience.”

Last year, The Kitschies received 137 submissions from over 50 publishers and imprints, including self-published books. The prize is open to both digital and physical submissions.

Please see the sumissions and judges pages at http://www.thekitschies.com. for more information about the judges and the prize as well as to get submissions instructions.

In a ceremony at the Star of Kings pub in London the winners of the 2017 Kitschies tentacles were announced. The judges commented on the state of genre, the pleasureable tactility of the books, the wonderful and difficult job of judging, and the pleasure of working with the genre community.

2017’s shortlisted books were narrowed down from 142 submissions, coming from over 48 publishers. The shortlists come from the largest literary and genre names in publishing to the smallest of independents.

Blackwell

About Blackwell’s

Blackwell’s began 139 years ago in Oxford and has a worldwide reputation for unrivalled customer service, specialist knowledge and passion for bookselling. We continue to be a values led business where putting our customers first, taking personal ownership, being professional and having integrity are part of who we are.

We have 32 shops including Flagship shops in Oxford, Cambridge, London and Edinburgh. There are 23 academic and campus shops with strong partnerships with their host universities. We have pop-up bookshops (called Connects) in many other HE UK institutions.

Blackwells.co.uk is growing rapidly in UK and international markets. The platform is designed and managed in-house from a London development office

About The Kitschies

The Kitschies are a not-for-profit association dedicated to promote the discussion of genre literature in all its many forms. To that end it hosts a range of events and runs an eponymous award each year to a range of books, celebrating progressive, intelligent, and entertaining literature with an element of the speculative or fantastic. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Karen Lord, Patrick Ness, Becky Chambers, Lauren Beukes, Ruth Ozeki and China Miéville.

Every year brings challenges, excitement, and something new: this year was no different. We’re thrilled to see the return of some old favourites as well as voices that mightn’t be considered speculative fiction. The breadth of all three lists is stunning.

– Award Directors Glen Mehn and Leila Abu El Hawa

London — The Kitschies, the prize for “novels containing elements of the speculative and fantastic” have revealed their shortlists for the most “progressive, intelligent and entertaining” books of 2017.

This year’s shortlisted books are narrowed down from 142 submissions, coming from over 48 publishers. The shortlists come from the largest literary and genre names in publishing to the smallest of independents.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Red/Gold judge, said of the shortlists, “The sheer range and quality of the books submitted for both the gold and red award was dazzling. It was hard enough to pick five and reducing the shortlists to a single winner in each category is going to be near impossible.”

Jet Purdie, winner of the 2015 Inky Tentacle, and Inky Tentacle judge, said “There were loads of gorgeous entries but I felt the selected finalists took the biggest risks, working extra hard to create something original that caught the eye and drew the reader into the story.”

Blackwell’s Blogging

The wonderful Blackwell’s booksellers will be blogging about the shortlist and promoting the books in their shops and social channels. Details can be found on the Blackwell’s dedicated Kitschies website.

The winners

The winners will be announced in a ceremony at The Star of Kings on 9th April, and receive a total of £2,000 in prize money, as well as one of the prize’s iconic Tentacle trophies.

The prize, sponsored by Blackwell’s, is now in its eighth year, with previous winners including Margaret Atwood, Tade Thompson, Hermione Eyre, Nick Harkaway, Lauren Beukes, China Miéville, and Patrick Ness.

About Blackwell’s

Blackwell’s began 139 years ago in Oxford and has a worldwide reputation for unrivalled customer service, specialist knowledge and passion for bookselling. We continue to be a values led business where putting our customers first, taking personal ownership, being professional and having integrity are part of who we are.

We have 32 shops including Flagship shops in Oxford, Cambridge, London and Edinburgh. There are 23 academic and campus shops with strong partnerships with their host universities. We have pop-up bookshops (called Connects) in many other HE UK institutions.

Blackwells.co.uk is growing rapidly in UK and international markets. The platform is designed and managed in-house from a London development office

About The Kitschies

The Kitschies are a not-for-profit association dedicated to promote the discussion of genre literature in all its many forms. To that end it hosts a range of events and runs an eponymous award each year to a range of books, celebrating progressive, intelligent, and entertaining literature with an element of the speculative or fantastic. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Karen Lord, Patrick Ness, Becky Chambers, Lauren Beukes, Ruth Ozeki and China Miéville.

Currently, we’re pretty much a one-person-band, and that person has a very full-time day job and theoretically writes in the evenings.

Seeking people who want to spend their time promoting the discussion of genre literature that is progressive, intelligent, and entertaining. Must love some of: dinosaurs, dragons, space pirates, monkeys, explosions, maths, sarcasm, neuroscience, ideas.

Must love tentacles.

You may have a passion and a skill for some or all of the following:

Event organising

Social media, including picking up the pieces of a flamewar after the awards director has tweeted from the wrong account again

Blog writing

PR

Organising things and people

Herding cats AKA judges

Other things that you think the Kitschies should be doing

We’re looking for fairly active self-starters who want to get their hands dirty and have fun.

This is a part-time job. This is a volunteer job. This isn’t really a job.

Rewards: meeting nice people, meeting rude people, books.

Email admin@thekitschies.com and let us know who you are and how you’d like to help.

Adam Roberts, in typical overachieving fashion, managed to read enough books to populate a full and complete shortlist.

Adam Roberts

No Kitschies were awarded last year. 2016 was a Kitschless year—for one year only it was Nitch on the Kitsch. Which was a shame, since 2016 saw a wealth of (to quote the Kitschies’ remit) ‘progressive, intelligent and entertaining works containing elements of the speculative or fantastic’. So, [*clears throat*] in my capacity a former judge, I thought I’d post some speculative short-lists for the year the prize didn’t happen.

A disclaimer is needful: I didn’t do last year, what I did in my judging year—that is, read a metric tonne of hard-copy and e-books, the better to be able to narrow down our shortlists. But I read a fair few and some of the books I read were really excellent. So here, for the sake of argument (and please: argue with what I list here) are my Phantom Kitschies shortlists for 2016.

Red Tentacle for the best novel

Naomi Alderman’s The Power is a brilliant jolt of a read, a book happy to inhabit blockbuster conventions in order to suborn them to some powerfully subversive ends. Teenage girls across the world suddenly discover they have the ability electrically to shock others—to burn them, cause them intense pain, even to kill them. The narrative rattles through the immediate implications of this: girls taking revenge on violent or raping men, girls simply being mean, girls collectively coming to a sense of their new power. But the strength of the novel is the way it follows-through its premise, into a world in which men are segregated for their own protection and women, for good and ill and with quite an emphasis on the latter, take control. I particularly liked the way this new society retcons its sense of the world—it becomes seen as ‘natural’ and a product of ‘evolutionary psychology’ for women to be aggressive and violent, since they have babies to protect; if men ever ruled the world their patriarchy would be nurturing and gentle. It’s a raw novel, more than a little jagged—though that also suits its theme—but sparky and engaging throughout. A lightning bolt of a read.

Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Winter is the third of his ‘fractured Europe’ novels, set in bivalve European set-up—one a tessellation of myriad tiny statelets and ruritaniae, the other, ‘The Community’ a calm but stifling version of 1950s Britain rolled out across the whole continent. The two versions of European reality are linked via a complex of strange portals. Each of the Europe books has a subtly different emphasis and tone, although all provide the pleasures of alt-spy adventures, a cosmopolitan richness of interlocking storylines and slowly unfurling mystery; but arguably this is the best of the three, from its bang-bang opening act of intercontinental railway terrorism through to its big finale. A modern classic.

Lavie Tidhar’s sprawling masterpiece Central Station, set in a future spaceport Tel Aviv, is easily his best book yet (and that’s saying something). What I particularly loved about this is the way it manages to be both gloriously old-fashioned in its SF—an actual fix-up novel set in a space-port in which a colourful variety of humans robots and aliens intermingle—and a distinctively twenty-first century novel about the complex but sustaining inter-relationship between culture and place and memory and technology and change. Most of all it’s about the centrality of stories to who we are, and about the way those stories are always collective and heterogeneous. It’s a marvel.

Christopher Priest’s The Gradual works a simple-enough sciencefictional version of time-zone differences into a haunting exploration of travel, aging and loss. Set like many of Priest’s best novels in his ‘Dream Archipelago’ of endless islands, it is the first-person narrative of composer Sandro Sussken, a citizen of the Glaund Republic on the Northern mainland (a downbeat, authoritarian society locked in an Orwellian permanent war with the Faianland Alliance). The success of his music means that, unlike most Glaundians, Sussken gets to travel from island to island, but in doing so he discovers the titular ‘gradual’, a kind of complex time-slip, or time-stall, that dislocates him from his origins, his family and in the end from the world as a whole. Priest uses his speculative conceit brilliantly to explore what it means to age. It makes me think how rarely the old figure, and how much more they ought to, in progressive narratives of equality and diversity.

Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories is a remarkable epic Fantasy, the follow-up to her debut A Stranger in Olondria (2013) and an even stronger novel. It gives us many of the satisfactions of this over-populated mode, as four women—an aristocrat, a military officer, a priestess and a nomadic poet—are caught up in the events leading to an empire-shaking war. But Samatar has the confidence, and the skill, to downplay the conventional satisfactions of narrative. The result is a gorgeous labyrinth of a text that circles through the permutations of its characters, plot, and the history of her world, richly written and formally involuted.

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad deploys its fantastical conceit—the literalisation of the celebrated 19th-century US ‘railroad’ along which slaves would try to pass to freedom as a network of actual excavated tunnels, railways and stations—with commendable restraint. He is not interested in the worldbuilding mechanics of his idea so much as in the imaginative freedom it gives him to send his heroine, Cora, on a journey encompassing the different violences slavery has manifested over the centuries. It is a novel that renders slave society as vividly and memorably brutal without, at any point, reverting to the pieties of hindsight or historical cliché. An unforgettable piece of fiction.

Golden Tentacle for best debut novel

Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit recasts Korean legend in a densely rendered high-tech future universe governed by ‘calendars’, sort-of computer programmes that determine the nature of reality itself. It’s a book that boldly drops its reader into its properly futuristic and alien cosmos—an interstellar empire called the Hexarchate in which six factions each with unique skills are competing for power. Though it might put some readers off, the advantage of this approach is that when the book clicks fully into focus it does so with kaleidoscopic brilliance and coherence. The game theory and maths, all the politics and military tactics, neatly offset some nicely written central relationships.

David Means’s Hystopia is a brilliant, baffling and expertly fractured novel set in an alt-1970s America in which Kennedy wasn’t assassinated, and Vietnam veterans are being treated for PTSD with psychedelics. It is steeped in the flavour of its era, and manages to be simultaneously weirdly familiar and intensely strange—quite the combo, that. I have to concede it’s a little distorting describing this as a ‘first novel’ (even though that’s what it is) because Means has been honing his craft writing short stories for decades. The technical skill shows: Means’s multi-viewpoint and deracinated approach could easily have slid into mere messiness; but though the novel is often violent it is also potent and, in its way, coherent.

Wyl Menmuir’s superbly eerie The Many is, though short, a tricky book to summarise. Suffice to say that as an exercise in unnerving the reader, this cryptic, powerful novella is remarkable. Its seemingly simple plot, about a young man coming to a Cornish seaside village to live in an abandoned cottage whose previous owner had drowned, invokes a sort-of ghost story, or perhaps hallucination, or perhaps dreamtime, to render its poisoned near-future world more obliquely vivid that any straightforward account ever could.

Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear wonderfully resuscitates a form—magic realism—I had thought dead and buried. A famous Brazilian writer, Beatriz Yagoda, up to her neck in gambling debt, goes missing; her American translator Emma flies down to South America to try and make sense of things. The characters she meets are colourful and varied (indeed, perhaps, their colourful variety is a little by rote), and the tone is lightly comic, but as the story goes on it becomes stranger and more beautiful, and Novey’s background as a lyric poet increasingly comes to dominate the telling. A short novel that leaves rich and strange residue in the imagination.

Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning boldly mashes together eighteenth-century manners and 25th-century adventure in a post-scarcity utopia where which gender-distinctions are taboo and large-scale affinity-groups are carefully manipulated and managed by behind-the-scenes forces to maintain broader social balance. Readers are liable to find the richly mannered idiom in which Palmer tells her story either beguiling—as I did—or, perhaps, archly offputting. But it is worth persevering with the narrative: there’s a piercing political intelligence at work here, of the sort that would surely have delighted the Enlightenment philosophes that inspired it. Intricately worked, and, I’m pleased to say, the first of a very promising series.

Nick Wood’s Azanian Bridges is set in a modern day South Africa still under the sway of Apartheid, and expertly uses this alt-historical premise to estrange and refresh the way racism violates social and human contexts, without abandoning the possibility of bridging this chasm. Sibusiso Mchunu, traumatised by seeing his friend killed at a demonstration, is admitted to a psychiatric hospital where White doctor Martin test him on his new invented, an ‘empathy machine’. The potential of this device, and its dangers, power a compact but very effective thriller. A thought-provoking and promising debut.

The story of green-haired gun-runner who wakes up one day to discover that she’s ruler of an interplanetary empire despite herself, there’s a lot here to like. K.B.Wagers isn’t doing anything astoundingly new with her political-intrigue/assassination-filled space opera… but she is doing some very nice things that would definitely make a Kitschies judge keep reading.

For a start, the empire that our heroine has to rule is matriarchal, and deliberately moulded on Indian mythology and culture. A men’s resistance movement is fighting back against the entrenched female monarchy, and as much time is spent attending temple and offering incense to Ganesh, as it is reminiscing on days with smugglers from other Chinese or more European-styled empires. It’s a nice take on familiar political themes, and a pleasant inversion on some very basic gender stereotypes.

Would it win? Alas, probably not. There is some dubious editing, and a large cast of characters blur into each other fairly easily, not to mention an impressive amount of time spent on remorseful tears and descriptions of saris. The plot, when you stop to think about it, is light around the edges – however it’s still a headlong rush of Stuff Happening In A Funky Place, and even if you put it aside after with a cry of ‘ah well next!’ you won’t have regretted the time spent reading at all.

The Space Between the Stars – Anne Corlett

I can see this being submitted to the Kitschies with a cry of ‘hell yes’. Its premise – what happens when 99.9999% of humanity is wiped out – isn’t new, but has the addition that it’s set in a future in which humanity has colonized the stars. Consequently, this isn’t your usual shuffle across a desolate Earth, but can be the story of what happens to the one person left alive when a whole colony goes dark, or the few survivors stranded in a hostile corner of the universe when it all collapses. It is also a story about going home, and what home is in a space this big, weaving in religion, sexuality, authoritarianism and loss.

While both the book and the writing hold huge promise, it suffers from a supporting cast of two-dimensional characters, who sometimes feel as if they are ticking off a wish-list of narrative viewpoints. Quietly-tortured sort-of-priest? Yeap. Prostitute with a heart of gold? Tick. Swaggering space Captain with a hidden gem of conscience who we all learn to love? Boom. For all of the book’s many charms, the SF-geek in my soul still feels that Firefly did this better.

It’s also worth noting that the book does an important thing well, and then gets hobbled by it. It talks about miscarriage, from a mother’s perspective, and how that has changed her life. Tackling this in life and fiction is an excellent thing, and huge cheers to Anne Corlett for going at it. However, when most of humanity has been wiped out from the universe and survivors are struggling to survive violence, oppression and probable death, you begin to ask whether the scale of the narrative premise set before this characters, doesn’t begin to outweigh the topic that is being put at the heart of the book. To my shame, as one who’s all down with talking about things that matter more, I found a moment arriving fairly soon where I just didn’t care about the main character’s history or anxieties… because the unexplored dangers of the situation and the unknown future were just more damn interesting.

Poison City – Paul Crilley

Hell no it wouldn’t win a Kitschie. But hell yes, we’d have had fun reading it, and at the shortlist meeting Glen would have broken out a Tupperware box full of wine and at least a couple of minutes would have been spent celebrating how much fun we had reading this book, and but how there were too many other books that are just pushing harder, more at the boundaries of fiction for us to give it a prize.

And yes – a brief flurry of discussion would have arisen about how nice it is to read urban fantasy both set in South Africa, and which draws so refreshingly on South African mythology and folklore. There almost certainly would have been a moment of tense discussion over how ethnicity is written about in the book, because these things do matter, followed fairly quickly by the conclusion that hey, this isn’t a tome setting out to tear anything down or build anything new – it’s just dead fun urban fantasy doing a funky thing in a groovy place, and it does that well.

It does it very well, and it’s hugely entertaining, and sometimes, amid the earnest contemplation of what the hell a progressive book prize even is, we’d all just breathe a sigh of relief that we get to rejoice in pure fun and fantasy too.

A Closed and Common Orbit – Becky Chambers

I was a judge the year A Long Way to a Small Angry Planetgot shortlisted, and it was a damn good book. As well as being beautifully written, it was a picture of a universe in which humanity was, for once, fully embracing what it meant to be humane. Aliens fell in love across the boundaries of species… sentience was celebrated as a beautiful gift, everyone was accepted for who they were and judgements were rarely levelled by characters against each other, and never by the writer. It felt like a universe I wanted to live in.

Plot? Heh. They go a place, and at the end, some stuff happens. But that is more or less the be-all and end-all of the book, and afterwards you’re left wondering just what it was that drew you along.

A Closed and Common Orbit is in many ways much the same… and it still works. Even though the plot is fairly light, even on the flashback sections which help build the characters more, and what action there is almost happens off-page in a sorta shrug at the end… I kept on turning pages and damnit, I kept on really, really caring. I cared for every single character, for their hopes and their dreams, and I loved them all not for the conflict they were experiencing, but for the compassion they showed each other, and how that drove them on. At the end there was a cry of ‘but what even happened really?’ and every now and then, when feeling vulnerable, I might just hug the book like a childhood teddy bear, and be in my happy place.

We at Tentacle HQ are very, very sad that we didn’t get to run the award last year – I mean, there are upsides, like not having to explain to house/office-mates that the 200ish books that one has built furniture from are going to be around, yes, dear, another six months at least.

But the downside was that there were some amazing books out in 2016. I mean, some really stunning things. I asked several past Kitschies judges to talk about some of the brilliant things that were progressive, intelligent, and entertaining and we’re going to put them up here.

I get to go first because, well, I do most things around here. In no particular order, my personal Kitschies fakelist for 2017:

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (@motomaratai) shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention: maths (for the non-mathematical) geeks grapple with empire and gender and culture and race and war. I don’t re-read a lot of books but re-read it after 6 months and not only remembered so much but was completely enthralled, again, with not only the worldbuilding, but the craft of the book: it’s very difficult to drop someone into the middle of a space battle where the rules of reality are rewritten based on a mathematical calendar of belief but Lee does it. Not only that, the hero/villain is stunning and the hero/victim makes you want someone to just… be nice to her. It’s rightly on the Clarke, the Hugo, the Nebula… and I’d be arguing it onto the Kitschies shortlist at the very least.

The Obelisk Gate by N.K Jemisin (@nkjemisin) is definitely worth a think about – to be honest, it might not make it to the shortlist because series books are a very, very difficult sell, but it’s made it onto the Nebula and Hugo shortlist in any case. Jemisin’s taken the world she’s built in the Red Tentacle shortlisted The Fifth Season and turned up the heat on the characters – literally and figuratively. It’s in some ways a more conventional story and it’s setting up the final book well, and our understanding from our spies in Elsinore that the third book is locked up tighter than The Winds of Winter, except that it exists.

Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-García is a vampire book that’s actually worth reading. Seriously. Even if you were a goth in the 90s with a severe vampire fetish and you could quote The Crow and now you’re so over it (ahem). Moreno-García takes us to Mexico DF, cutting from the poorest residents to the richest, from old money to new, and lets us examine our own power struggles and our own attempts to grow up. It’s an excellent read, and it should really be on more shortlists.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. We loved reading A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet two years ago, which was a small story about big things – and this book shows how Chambers has developed her craft. It’s a love letter to anyone who’s ever felt like a total and complete outcast and who’s managed to find another outcast friend. The thing that Chambers does is take something that’s tropey as hell – you could almost imagine Heathers or Mean Girls rewritten with Blue and Pepper as the nerds telling their side of the story, but then she uses those tropes to tell something deeper. She deserves every fan she’s got.

Those are my four – keep in mind that I haven’t read nearly as widely as a judge – I didn’t get tipper truck loads of books dropped at my offices this year. We’ll have more from Cat Webb and Adam Roberts in just a few days.

After a year of hiatus, we are OPEN for submissions. We can’t wait to read all your lovely special snowflake books about death, giant grasshoppers, the prison industrial complex, broken cities, mothers dying, and the mare’s urine based beauty industrial complex. You never really can go home.

We want books published by everyone: don’t forget the women, LGBTQAIU (and anyone that bag of letters may have missed), people of colour, immigrants, refugees – if Nigel Farage hates them, we’d like to read them.

We want that book that you loved which might or might not make it in the market – don’t look at our winners, look at our shortlists. We love books about immigration, death, floating obelisk monsters, race, bio-augmented racing dogs, silkpunk, gender, blood, gore, and yes, tentacles. That book that you read out of the slush pile that you fought your senior to publish because you know that it’s going to touch people even if it only sells 150 copies (but you think it might be the next A Monster Calls? That one. The odd one sitting in the corner that doesn’t quite fit, its feet too big and its specs askew on its spotty face. We’re going to love it send it to us. We’ll be kind, even if we don’t shortlist it.

The Kitschies celebrate progressive, intelligent and entertaining books that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic. All submissions should keep these criteria in mind.

Any queries should be sent to submissions@thekitschies.com.

Please read the details below carefully and contact us beforesubmitting your book(s) for the addresses and shipping details.

There is no submission fee for The Kitschies. Please note the following:

The Kitschies prefer digital submissions (ebooks). You may send us physical books but it’s easier on all our judges to have ebooks. Please be prepared to send us physical copies if you are shortlisted, however.

Although there is no limit on the number of titles than can be submitted from each publisher or author, we do ask that publishers not send us their entire catalogue.

Please select your books that deserve to be recognised as progressive, intelligent, and entertaining.

Please send us books throughout the year, not in one almighty paper floodin late November.

Please note that the closing date for submissions is 1st November.If you can’t get books to us before then, you can let us know ahead of time.

The closing date for The Kitschies is midnight (GMT), 1 November 2017. There are no exceptions. For books published between 2nd November 2017 and 31 December, 2017, we are happy to accept advance or proof copies, or to receive them after the deadline by prior arrangement. This means you need to email us before midnight, 1st November and let us know what and when to expect the books.

The Kitschies, the annual literary award that recognises “the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic” has announced that Blackwell’s, the nationwide chain of specialist bookshops, is to be its new headline sponsor.

The awards, which includes categories for novel; debut novel; cover art and digital fiction offers financial prizes up of £500 and £1000 for the its ‘Tentacle’ awards for

novel (Red Tentacle), debut novel (Golden Tentacle), cover art (Inky Tentacle) and digitally native fiction (Invisible Tentacle). As part of the new relationship, The Kitschies and Blackwell’s will also be working together to deliver a series of events for lovers of speculative literature in many of its almost 40 bookshops around the country.

The closing date for The Kitschies is midnight on November 1st each year. Applications are open only to work first published in the United Kingdom between 1 January and 31 December of the year in question. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Karen Lord, Patrick Ness, Becky Chambers, Lauren Beukes, Ruth Ozeki and China Miéville.

Kieron Smith, Blackwell’s Digital Director comments:

“The Kitschies has a track record of highlighting some of the most exciting, and engaging fiction published over the last few years and matches our mission to support progressive intelligent and entertaining genre literature. We look forward to working with The Kitschies to introduce more great titles to readers in our shops, and online at Blackwells.co.uk, over the coming year.”

Glen Mehn, Kitschies awards director, says:

“We think that Blackwell’s are exactly the right sponsor for The Kitschies: not only are they one of the most recognised high street bookshop brands, they understand our mission: getting people talking about, reading, and loving books.”

About Blackwell’s

Trading since 1879, Blackwell’s is the largest academic and specialist bookseller in the UK. In addition to flagship shops in Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Edinburgh and London, it has a permanent presence at or close to around 30 universities around the UK, from Aberdeen and Belfast to Exeter and Portsmouth, as well as a complete online offering and a special free-to-download eLearning platform developed specifically with students in mind.

The Kitschies are going to take 2016 off.

We have exciting plans for the future, and, rather than rush to make 2016 happen, we’re going to concentrate on 2017 (and beyond) instead.

Interested in being part of our future?

We’re looking for sponsors – both full and partial. An ideal sponsor is someone that shares our vision of a diverse, exciting future, and is keen to connect with the intelligent, fun-loving, and (very) chatty world of readers.

We’re also recruiting more members to the team to make us even stranger and more unusual than ever before. These are volunteer positions to help us with everything from web design to event management, as we prepare to wrap our tentacles around bigger and better things.

If you’re interested in getting involved – either as a partner or a volunteer – get in touch at admin@thekitschies.com.

We’ll be sharing all our schemes and dreams as they happen on Twitter at @thekitschies, or join our mailing list here.